Join us on Twitter and IRC (#ludumdare on Afternet.org) for the Theme Announcement!

Thanks everyone for coming out! For the next 3 weeks, we’ll be Playing and Rating the games you created.You NEED ratings to get a score at the end. Play and Rate games to help others find your game.We’ll be announcing Ludum Dare 36’s August date alongside the results.

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I do a lot of AI programming for my job, but I have very little experience with UI and game programming.

I love Ludum Dare because it gives me a hard deadline so that I can finish my Hobbyist game projects. I've also "met" some awesome people here.

Here are short comments on my former entries:

Namcap - reverse pacman: My favorite LD game so far.
Maxe Explorers: My first LD game, and not bad at all, compared to later ones. A testament to the KISS principle.
The Fair King - My first Android game, you can find it on the Play store as well!
Dinosaur Rush - This game is full of awesomeness. Rawr!

The reaction to my little game was much better than I anticipated! Thank you all for your nice comments.

In this new version, I have fixed some of the most common complaints:

Controls: Now the X button opens a menu which lets you choose the item to place. You can also overwrite items without using the erase tool if you want to.

Balance: No more Bread Machine > All Also, the output machine’s cost increase with each new machine in the world. Use the Conveyor belts!

New items: Chickens and Eggs machines

Also: A bunch of small fixes and improvements.

I hope you enjoy it! I’ll try to keep working on this game a little bit every weekend until I clear through my TODO list. Suggestions regarding the balance are highly appreciated. And as always, if you got a high score, send me the screenshot!

Not a game yet, but after 4 hours, I have an idea down and the main mechanic implemented.

Funny thing is, I was thinking about this game for the whole week. I was lucky that the theme fits the idea that I want to implement so perfectly.

So the idea is this: a top-down action game. Normal stuff: walls, enemies that shoot you, weapons. I was thinking about something a bit like the air combat of Xenonauts.

But here is the twist: the rooms and dungeons that you fight in are generated randomly, based on your geocoordinates! Is the current level too easy? Go to a nearby coffee shop and see if you can find something better. Need a green key? Somewhere in the way between your house and your supermarket, there may be a dungeon containing it.

For those who know me an care, I’m in! 😀 I am busy and tired as hell this month, but that is not enough reason to break my streak of 8 LDs in a row.

Looking at the final theme list, the feeling that I have is that for the last 3-4LDs the finalists have been same old same old… So I am kinda already building my game in my head. I had a neat idea a few weeks ago which I will try to boot off this weekend.

I have recently made a small update to my game (post-compo). This update
fixes a bug on android related to putting the game in the background, and adds a much needed tutorial!
(Never underestimate how confusing your game can be, no matter how simple you make it)

This was a fun Ludum Dare. I think I really nailed the theme with my game, “Layers”. A few people were having difficulty playing the game, so I decided to make a video to give an introduction to it. I also tacked the timelapse at the end of the video:

Have fun!

Please play and leave a comment for layers. I am planning on making a video of some of my favorite entries in a week or two, once works lets up a bit.

Layers is my long-desired QiX clone. I hope the relation with the theme is pretty obvious once you start playing. The game is basically feature-complete now, except for sound. The input method can use some work as well.

Finally, I got the “main” gameplay loop working! I still need a bunch of stuff in the game lifecycle (such as loading levels, menus, game over, etc), but the game is at a point where it is possible to at least test the input.

What game? I am making a QiX clone – I think that the QiX mechanic (you have to cut away the play area) is very closely tied with this theme.

After a bunch of problems, I finally managed to get the very basic mechanics of my game down. Here is a screenshot:

There is still a lot to do before this can become a game, but I’m happy that I’m finally getting into my rhythm. I’m not completely sure if my control scheme is good, so I need to put out a prototype as soon as possible.

One hour for LD to start. The lucky thing about living at GMT+9 is that the start of the compo sits nicely at 10AM. I can wait for the theme announcement, and then take a shower while thinking about what the game should be.

I’m spending the last few minutes preparing my environment: setting up the screenshots for the time lapse, organizing my windows and desktops, and cleaning out my house a little bit.

As usual, my setup is something like this:

Programming Language: Java+LibGDX: LibGDX turned 1.0.0, I haven’t played with it since last LD, but as far as I can tell, everything still works in mostly the same way that I’m used to. The wikis have much more information. There is this new build system, Gradle, which I’m still not quite familiar with, but I figured out how to build and package my game.

Environment: Kubuntu+Eclipse: I have updated to the latest version of eclipse (Kepler), which seems to hang out and eat the context menu from time to time. That is not so good and I hope it doesn’t happen this weekend.